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Letter to the editor

'Curves' but no heaving bosoms

Think romance novels, and the people who write them, are illogical? Think again.

By JON WILSONTimes Staff Writer
Published December 19, 2004

ST. PETERSBURG - Beverly Brandt listens equally to her right brain and left brain. So far, such attention is paying off.

Both creative and business-savvy, Brandt has had five novels published. Six more are due out next year. Room Service, published in 2003 by St. Martin's Paperbacks, is on track to become a movie. Actor-singer Jessica Simpson is being talked up as the lead.

Brandt, 38, hopes her strategy and energy one day will vault her to the top rank of romance novelists. It's a $1-billion-a-year industry accounting for 48 percent of popular paperback fiction, according to the Romance Writers of America Web site.

"This is what I was meant to do. I've wanted to be a writer since I was 12," Brandt said. She has been doing it seriously since 1999.

She knows all about the tribulation the craft can bring: hitting a plot dead-end, figuring out a character's motivation, untangling subplots and tying them back up, projecting, connecting with the people you've created in your mind and on a computer screen.

"When I'm done writing a book, I get on my couch for three days, face down, and just groan," Brandt said.

Ah, but then the other side can kick in, the one with numbers, charts, graphs and schedules.

A college finance major who left a six-figure job to follow her dream, Brandt approaches the business side of her writing career in an intensely organized way that might jar the more ethereal types in the artistic world.

For one thing, she uses spread sheets to chart the development and direction of the main plot and each subplot. The spread sheets note such elements as time, setting and plot category. Brandt has in essence a graphic portrayal of her novel; it keeps the story organized and can be an immense help during the revision process.

"When I get stuck, at least I have a tool that might help me," Brandt said.

It came about because she found herself "totally blocked" on True North, a 2002 St. Martin's book. The editors wanted a massive revision. "Everything they wanted me to do impacted everything else," she said. That's when she created the plot-charting technique, which let her take one piece at a time instead of being smothered by a woolly mammoth. "It let me bite the toe of the elephant," Brandt said.

The visual aid isn't the half of it.

Brandt does media kits to help print and electronic journalists.

She maintains deadline and book release schedules, and uses more spread sheets to track income.

She arranges and attends book signings, travels to conferences and, on her Web site, www.beverlybrandt.com she runs contests to name her newsletter, which she sends to readers.

She surfs the Web, combs e-mails and reads Publisher's Weekly to keep up with the writing industry.

For another 2002 book, Record Time, she spent about $1,000 buying 3,500 old 45 rpm records, which she sent to booksellers as a promotion.

Sometimes she teaches writing online.

All of it, the business side and the writing, takes place in a converted bedroom office at her Venetian Isles home.

Her first three books sold "fast, fast, fast," Brandt said. "Then I hit the wall. I couldn't sell anything."

But she is back on track and is branching, at least a little. Her alter ego (and pseudonym) Jacey Ford is the author of Dangerous Curves, a suspenseful adventure featuring what the industry sometimes calls "kick a- heroines."

No surprise, the ones in Dangerous Curves take on business and find creative solutions.

[Last modified December 19, 2004, 00:15:16]